Tag Archives: Cronyism

Have you ever heard of David Richter, or of Hill International (HI), or of HIs newest subsidiary, HillStone International (HSI)? It seems that an executive vice president at HSI is James Biden, the younger brother of Vice President Joe Biden.

So what? Well, let me try to answer that question. David Richter is president of HI. At a meeting of investors in 2011, Richter said of HSIs recent winning of a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq that it helps to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner.” James Biden (net worth: about $7 million) has been, since 2010, vice president of HSI, despite very little, if any, work history in the residential construction business. James Biden seems to have a remarkable lack of business experience outside of politics . So what is James Biden’s value to HI? As Charles Gasparino says, “James Biden’s obvious value comes from his connection to the Obama administration.”

Gasparino was assured by Richter that James Biden had nothing to do with the Iraq project, or any other government projects recently landed by HI. I have to ask: “Just how stupid do Richter and HI think we are?” CDN readers do not fall for this chicanery, but the MSM seems to look away, and a sizeable portion of the US population must be pretty stupid since Obama has a chance (getting smaller each day) of being re-elected.

HI has, since 2011, been losing money, and has seen its stock price fall from almost $20 per share in 2008, to open this morning (October 24, 2012) at $3.64. But HI is expected to be profitable once HSIs Iraq project gets started. HSI officials say the Iraq project is expected to generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years. That is over three times all the revenues HI produced in 2011.

HI owns 51 percent of HSI. Investors, of which James Biden is one, own 49 percent of HSI. That means that James Biden has the potential to participate in millions of dollars of HSI profit. Not too bad for being the brother of the veep. And guess who will pay the profits in which Biden will participate. That’s correct, us taxpayers. The $1.5 billion Iraq deal is contingent upon Iraqi government financing, but guess from where this project’s money is coming.

It seems the expression of the day now, the new “gravitas”, in referring to our political/economic system is “crony-capitalism”. This term is such a misnomer that it almost defies explanation. I looked up capitalism in Webster’s Dictionary and the term cannot possibly be partnered with the word “crony”. According to Webster, capitalism is defined as:

Capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Cronyism is defined as:

Cronyism; partiality to cronies especially as evidenced in the appointment of political hangers-on to office without regard to their qualifications.

How can one possibly put these two words together to describe our economic system? The two terms do not go together in any fashion, other than to make some pundit sound smart to those who don’t understand our economic and political systems.

A more correct term for our current political/economic system would be fascism. I also looked up fascism to get an accurate definition. According to Webster, fascism is:

Fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition: A tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.

When I look at what the government is doing to our economic system today fascism seems to be a much more appropriate term. Look at the bailouts, TARP, Stimulus, and all the other government plans to pick winners and losers. In the auto industry bondholders took a beating while Democrat Party/Obama supporting unions made millions. The American taxpayer also took a bath in this little escapade. The banks and Wall Street firms are in the same category.

Those who support the entrenched government establishment of both political parties came out with billions of taxpayer money while those paying the bill, taxpaying citizens, got the shaft in a huge way. Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took tens of millions of dollars in “golden parachutes” into Wall Street with them. The executives at the big Wall Street firms and the biggest banks in the world reaped hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in bonuses with the bailouts of the “too big to fail” scam foisted on We the People.

And then we have Queen Michelle running around with her “Lunchroom Gestapo”, inspecting the lunches of children. Turkey from home is unhealthy. Here, school child, take these fat filled, processed chicken nuggets instead. Oh, and we can’t buy the king size candy bars any more because we aren’t smart enough to figure out what is in our best nutritional interests so Queen Michelle extorted Mars Candy Company to insure the king sized bars are no longer available. And let’s feed the school kids a third meal at school because those obese wrecks of children are being starved to death because they aren’t being fed at home. Am I the only one who sees starving obese children being a bit of an oxymoron?

This is not capitalism, it is fascism. Crony fascism seems to be the proper term for our current political/economic system. We find the government, Barack Obama through his czars/cronies, running everything in this nation by fiat. Bureaucrats not approved by the Senate as provided for in the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 2) make rules and regulations every day with no regard for the Constitution, the rule of law, or what is in the best interests of this nation and the citizens of this nation as a whole. As they do this the Republicans in Congress sit on their hands and do nothing to stop it. And why would they? George W. Bush and the current crop of Republicans are in this up to their ears. How can they complain when many of them were the actual authors of much of what has happened to our economic system over the last 10 years?

The United States of America is no longer a Republic. It is now a dictatorial oligarchy, ala Venezuela, ruled by Barack Obama and his czars with the complicit neglect of the Republican leadership in Congress. Members of Congress and various bureaucrats make millions by using insider trading advantages that are against the law for anyone outside of government to use. Our once vaunted capitalistic system is so rife with fascist corruption that it no longer resembles the system put in place by our founding fathers.

Politicians have so totally corrupted the system that it is questionable if capitalism can be revived. Unfortunately, most politicians seem to have no desire to revive our capitalistic system, nor the Constitution that brought it into existence. They are satisfied to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of We the People. When politicians and bureaucrats rule by fiat we no longer have a capitalistic system nor do we have a Constitutional system.

In Hitler’s Germany factories were run by private companies but they were controlled by the government in every aspect of business. This is where we find our nation’s industries and businesses today. Nothing can be done without the permission of some czar, bureaucrat, or judge. Every aspect of life is controlled from Washington D. C. If this doesn’t change soon future generations will not know any vestige of the freedom I grew up with.

The term African-American is a contrived term used to divide us by race, create a fake “oppressed minority”, and give preferential treatment to a group of people who don’t deserve it. Capital-Cronyism, in comparison, is a term used to create a fake economic system, disguise the true state of affairs in our business world, and create the illusion that we still operate under the system of business installed by our founding fathers. If people heard the word fascism used every day instead of “crony-capitalism” we would see an uprising of major proportions because there are still enough of us alive who understand the meaning of the term fascism to create discontent with government interference in the economic well-being of our nation.

We the People are being inundated with phony terms created by tyrants to subvert the Constitution and to subjugate the citizens without us realizing we are being enslaved. It is sad but so many people are either not intelligent enough to see what is happening, don’t care, or think that if they ignore what is happening that it isn’t real. One day soon these people will wake up and wonder where their freedom went. I can tell them where it went. Freedom went out the door of apathy, cowardice, or ignorance.

I submit this in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, in faith, with the responsibility given to me by Almighty God to honor His work and not let it die from neglect.

If you aren’t furious, you aren’t paying attention. In case you’ve missed it, your money has been the fodder for some of the most poorly vetted investments ever, and not by Wall Street or the banking industry.

Thanks in part to this article by Doug Stewart ( @dmatthewstewart on Twitter) and further conversation on the growing list of failed Green energy investment projects during a recent interview , I have become completely convinced that vetting, if any, for funding potential Green energy products was performed by a few guys eating pizza and throwing darts at applications taped to the wall.

While not the first project to fail miserably, even after an injection of stimulus funding, Solyndra is probably the the poster child for failed vetting and cronyism, that are apparantly the norm for deciding where to spend taxpayer dollars. Add in Shepherds Flat ( which, we don’t even *need* to fund since GE HAS the capital!) ,SunPower’s PAC action win , the EPA approved TR Auto Truck Plaza mess, The failed job delivery and inanity of the Fisker Motors investment, the likely march of the Chevy Volt into both fiscal and progressive failure, and the likelihood that Doug is correct about Alstom, and you have a laundry list of failures that exceeds anything that can be pinned on the private sector. Each of these investments inherently contained an easily verifiable history of risk that should have been a red flag for any review panel, if they had bothered to check into them at all ( or hadn’t been told to ignore the flags) I’d be willing to bet that the woodwork is crawling with plenty more evidence of the complete waste of taxpayer money due to non-existent vetting processes.

Johnathan Silver, the Energy Department’s loan program director, has stepped down, most certainly as a sacrifice to the indignant, but there needs to be full on public rage at this outright failure and deception by our government to even attempt responsibility with our economy. Silver’s resignation is an appeasement offering, and I am not appeased. It’s time to take the dartboard away and for us to get more involved in keeping an eye on our money. I have an idea of a replacement past-time..